That runtime system is huge. I remember it was an obstacle to high-assurance in Haskell. Is there a detailed write-up on what those 80,000loc do? Maybe someone could redo it in one of the verifying, imperative languages like SPARK or ATS to increase its assurance without full verification.
The rts is pretty nicely written c code. And folks on the ghc irc channel on frenode and mailing lists are all pretty helpful when you have solid questions
I haven't heard anything about obstacles for high assurance, but the runtime is definitely considered stable, and rarely needs any components updated AFAIK.
That's doubtful that high-assurance Haskell is in much demand actually. People usually prefer much more strict (in both senses) languages for that, CakeML in particular comes to mind.
By the way, there is a project to "Implement a front-end for CakeML that accepts OCaml or Haskell syntax"
> An involved version of this project would be to write a new verified parser for an alternative syntax. A simpler version would be to re-target the parser in the OCaml compiler to produce CakeML abstract syntax, and treat this as an executable specification. Similarly for any Haskell compiler that is amenable to such treatment.
I tried to figure out what subset of sml cake uses but wasn’t able to find that anywhere in their docs
But yeah, it’s definitely true that high assurance / high quality tools are still in their relative infancy (there’s lots of great stuff, but nothing I’d be comfortable using with colleagues at the drop of a hat for a quick project next week)
